Washpark

Authors: Pat Clifford and Tyrone Williams

Publisher: Delete Press (2021)

"Once attention is drawn to 'the establishment of the horizontal axis', social life has taken a turn toward a material, critically torqued political ethnography that documents the disillusion of space, as is the ongoing situation when two dear friends, deeply rooted in Cincinnati get together and exert pressure on the totalizing gentrification of a neighborhood called Over-the-Rhine. Do you understand the forest for the trees or the trees for the forest when an entire eco-social system is at stake?—Tyrone Williams and Patrick Clifford hold multiple angles of inquiry simultaneously as the urban environment transforms around and within them. A maniacal and drastic repetition is at hand. 'Trouble brought trouble' as a crisis of hyper monetization that captivates presence, when (time and again) neo-colonial jurisdiction initiates a 'curricularized' displacement of displaced people, contemporizing segregation. A palimpsest of architected municipal design passed down from the Age of Reason to the Anthropocene. This 'involved elegy' builds strength, vulnerability, intimacy and care. Washpark is an intense and complexly nuanced collaborative intervention that disabuses us of the notion of progress and other manufactured deceptions in our civic sphere."

–Brenda Iijima